I don’t trust anything related to red hat
It’s just morally rough that they basically said they don’t get anything of benefit from contributing to open source despite really owing their start to it
Interesting. But what If I’m not using CoreOS? Also RedHat fucked up by using YAML for configuration.
What is wrong with YAML for configuration? It is much more easy to read then say json.
YAML is way too bloated of a standard and has a ton of inconsistencies between implementations, despite the widespread reputation of simplicity. It is easy to read as long as you limit yourself to a fraction of its capabilities and err on the side of caution when it comes to escaping characters (especially when number literals are involved, or booleans for that matter). As far as alternatives go, I prefer TOML for simple key=value configs, but it has its own issued and is nowhere near as featureful, for better or worse.
If you’re just reading configs then yeah, it’s superior. If you’re maintaining big complex configurations, possibly for multiple machines, you need something to reduce boilerplate. Jsonnet, nickel or nix are excellent here. So the best way is to use one of those, generate yaml, and deploy. Saves you a lot of headaches but it’s one more moving thing in your pipeline which can break.
There is some surprising behavior with some of the features of yaml, mostly arising from the fact that it looks nice to read. Here’s a list of things that you can avoid to avoid a lot of the pitfalls: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/why/ . I haven’t actually used strictyaml, but the arguments it presents are pretty solid and some are things I’ve run into in real environments
what if I’m not using CoreOS?
Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It’s essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.
…except I can run Docker anywhere. It’s not tied to systemd. These quadlets seem like a very systemd-specific thing. Which is great if you’re building everything around systemd but it’s a niche.
systemd [is] a niche
Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn’t systemd-based unless you’re deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.
Any time I always read how to accomplish something in podman-land , the action takes like 5 extra steps compared to docker, is probably an experimental feature that’s not supported and is always from a non-official source or some random blog.
If you make something with Podman yourself it is actually less work most of the time (the OP tutorial is incredibly convoluted for no reason).
But sure, if someone else did all the work for you and you just need to download the docker-compose file and run it, that is of course less work for you. But that is just a result of Docker’s relative popularity compared to Podman.
If you make something with Podman yourself it is actually less work most of the time (the OP tutorial is incredibly convoluted for no reason).
Doubt.
OP’s guide is simply describing how podman is designed to work. With systemd unit files for managing services.
But sure, if someone else did all the work for you and you just need to download the docker-compose file and run it, that is of course less work for you. But that is just a result of Docker’s relative popularity compared to Podman.
Why re-invent the wheel?
Doubt.
Cool attitude. In my experience, most docker/docker-compose setups will work transparently with podman/podman-compose. If you want to tighten security, lock down ressource access, run rootless (daemon and inside the container), integrate with SELinux, then you might need to put in extra-work, just like you would if you used docker.
Why re-invent the wheel?
They aren’t. Podman is mostly just a docker-compatible CLI wrapper around an existing OCI runtime (runc by default). It also lets you manage pods and export k8s yaml, which is arguably the more important industry standard at this point. Podman was also completely usable in rootless mode way before Docker support for that was on the table, which was the main reason I switched years ago. Podman development effort also yielded buildah, which is a godsend if you want to build container images in a containerized environment, without granting docker socket access (which is a security nightmare) or using some docker in docker scenario (which is just a nightmare in general).
Yes, but only 10% or so of the article is about what you actually need to know to use Quadlet and the rest is some convoluted mess that I don’t know why the author bothered with sharing that.
I think he’s referring to the fact that it’s mixed in with a bunch of CoreOS setup stuff. I also thought the same of this tutorial. I use podman myself but I have no interest in CoreOS. It was a bit difficult trying to extract just the podman related stuff out of that tutorial.
In my limited experience, when Podman seems more complicated than Docker, it’s because the Docker daemon runs as root and can by default do stuff Podman can’t without explicitly giving it permission to do so.
99% of the stuff self-hosters run on regular rootful Docker can run with no issues using rootless Podman.
Rootless Docker is an option, but my understanding is most people don’t bother with it. Whereas with Podman it’s the default.
Docker is good, Podman is good. It’s like comparing distros, different tools for roughly the same job.
Pods are a really powerful feature though.
In my limited experience, when Podman seems more complicated than Docker, it’s because the Docker daemon runs as root and can by default do stuff Podman can’t without explicitly giving it permission to do so.
Can’t argue with that. There’s some truth to this.
99% of the stuff self-hosters run on regular rootful Docker can run with no issues using rootless Podman.
If this figure was even close to being remotely true, everyone would have moved to rootless containers by now.
Rootless Docker is an option, but my understanding is most people don’t bother with it. Whereas with Podman it’s the default.
These two share the same set of problems. People don’t want to downgrade from a “working” docker to a rootless “safer” docker that comes with more usability headaches.
Docker is good, Podman is good. It’s like comparing distros, different tools for roughly the same job.
Not really. The two are really different underneath but on surface they may look like they are overlapping solutions to the untrained eye.
Pods are a really powerful feature though.
Last time I was giving podman a try, I didn’t find anything really special about pods. Maybe it just didn’t click for me or I was not the intended audience.
on surface they may look like they are overlapping solutions to the untrained eye.
You’ll need to elaborate on this, since AFAIK Podman is literally meant as a replacement for Docker. My untrained eye can’t see what your trained eye can see under the surface.
I use podman because it’s more secure. I’m willing to put in the extra effort so that all my services aren’t running as root. If it turns out a vulnerability is discovered in lemmy tomorrow that allows people to access my server through my lemmy container, the attacker will only have access to a dummy account that hosts my containers. Yes, they could stop all my containers, but they can’t delete the volumes or any other data on my server.
Podman might have a “more secure” design but you can run the docker daemon as rootless. Podman itself is not immune to vulnerabilities and will not solve all your security problems.
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Security is not all or nothing. Reducing the attack surface is still important.
Can you elaborate on running docker daemon as rootless? It’s my understanding that you can add your account to a group to access the docker daemon rootless, but the containers are still running as root, as the daemon itself raises the access to root.
Honestly, this is kinda making me wanna redeploy a couple app stacks I have on a VPS. Hmm.
Oh, well that’s simple…
